Greek Lessons by celebrated Korean author and Man Booker International Prize winner Han Kang is a brief, poetic, and intimate look into the lives of two people, each affected by a disability, both cleaved from society in their own way, yet progressively drawn together by their shared grief and nascent hope. The narration switches between the two, tracing their lives in a series of flashbacks or letters to loved ones that show how each progressively fell away from family and friends, either due to distance or death and divorce.
One of the two unnamed protagonists is a woman who has lost, for the second time, her ability to speak. She recently lost her mother to cancer and lost custody of her son due to a lengthy divorce proceeding. Faced with insurmountable sadness, her ability to articulate words is lost, yet her keen perceptions of the world around her remain, even as she further feels disconnected from society, an exacerbation of a feeling she’s felt her whole life.
She had dreamed of a single word in which all human language was encompassed… One single word, bonded with tremendous density and gravity. A language that would, the moment someone opened their mouth and pronounced it, explode and expand as all matter had at the universe’s beginning… She would dream that the immense crystallized mass of all language was being primed like an ice-cold explosive in the centre of her hot heart, encased in her pulsing ventricles.

Wanting to reclaim language on her own terms, she enrolls in Ancient Greek lessons at a private language academy. The book—translated into English by Emily Yae Won along with Deborah Smith who has translated three of Han Kang’s other works and shared the Man Booker Prize with the author—reveals Han Kang’s fascination with the use of a Middle Voice in Ancient Greek, a grammatical feature absent in both Korean and English that is between the active and passive voices where the subject or agent is also the object or target, and which provides a unique way to express one’s relationship with the world and events.
It is at the academy that she encounters a slight, bespectacled professor who is likewise separated from society due to his family’s immigration to Germany when he was a child, his return to Korea—a country he once knew but now is almost as alien as his second home—and more pressingly, his failing vision which with soon render him blind.
He hides his failing sight by memorizing each lesson and sticking to daily habits that allow him to function in a society that he is increasingly cut off from. He finds comfort in the sounds of the city and the fading patterns of light he observes on lonely walks around Seoul, but even this too fills him with a wistful melancholy as he knows that the little he can perceive will be soon taken from him.
There were nights when I thought of that frightening silence of yours. A silence entirely different from R’s, as R’s silence had felt like an immense pool of undulating light. Yours was like a hand under ice that had turned stiff after slamming in vain at the frozen surface. A silence like a snowdrift blanketing a blood-stained body. I was genuinely afraid that your silence would turn to actual death. Turn rigid, then glacial.
The two eventually begin an awkward, tentative friendship that transcends their disabilities without curing them. Their friendship blossoms into a tentative romance that is left undeveloped, with only its tentative first steps mentioned in the story.
The verb “to love” rendered in the middle voice, “X is loved”, ultimately means X affects me.
The book’s sparse yet profound prose occasionally slides into poetry to express some of the characters’ deeper reflections. The unnamed male narrator uses the first person to express his thoughts, but in a beautiful twist, the female narrator uses the third person as if giving literary life to her inability to speak.
This brief work gives life and beauty to the slow degradation of the human body over the course of a life and provides hope and meaning in the company we can find in those who share our condition. Greek Lessons joins Han Kang’s other outstanding works like The Vegetarian and Human Acts in exploring the human condition and breathing life into our humanity with poetic prose.
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